What Happens When You Do File.Delete For A Non-Existent File In C# & .NET

Was recently writing a small utility that needed to generate some files, process them, add them to a zip archive, and then delete them.

Somewhere in the code was this line:

File.Delete(filename)

Pretty straightforward.

However, as I was debugging the code, I realized that filename did not, in fact, exist!

The runtime happily proceeded to silently execute that line and continue.

No exception.

I found that intriguing.

Should you not throw an exception if the file you want to delete doesn’t exist?

The first port of call was the documentation:

Interesting.

This, I suppose, is one of those philosophical questions.

If the file you want to delete already isn’t there, is the inability to delete it an exception?

TLDR

File.Delete for a file that does not exist does not throw an exception.

Happy hacking!